Sometime in the closing decades of the sixth century, Bishop Aunarius of Auxerre gathered the clergy and monastic leaders of his diocese for a synod that would leave behind one of the most revealing collections of church regulations from Merovingian Gaul. The surviving acts contain forty-five canons. Some deal with the ordinary concerns of church government, including worship, burial, marriage, clerical behavior, and ecclesiastical discipline. Others reach beyond church walls and into the religious habits of ordinary people.
Those particular canons condemn New Year disguises and gifts, vows made at trees and springs, consultation of diviners, sacred lots, wooden images, and certain nocturnal vigils. They offer an unusual glimpse into the complicated religious world that existed centuries after Christianity had first spread through Roman Gaul.
Canons 1, 3, 4, and 5 form the heart of this evidence. Together they show a bishop trying to redirect religious behavior toward churches, Christian worship, charity, and practices controlled by the clergy. Yet they also raise a difficult historical question. Were the customs Aunarius condemned really remnants of pagan religion, or had many of them already become part of the religious lives of people who considered themselves Christian?
That question makes the Council of Auxerre far more important than a simple collection of prohibitions.
Dating the Council of Auxerre
Older histories commonly place the Council of Auxerre in 578, while other works have assigned it to 585 or the years immediately afterward. The exact date, however, remains uncertain.
Recent scholarship has taken a more cautious position. Gregory Halfond’s 2026 study dates the diocesan synod broadly to the episcopate of Aunarius, approximately 561 to 605. More importantly, the surviving acts appear to depend on legislation from the Second Council of Mâcon in 585. If that relationship is correct, the Council of Auxerre probably occurred after 585 rather than in 578.
For that reason, describing it simply as a late sixth-century council is safer than attaching too much certainty to a single year.
The subscriptions also help reveal what kind of gathering Auxerre was. This was not a great kingdom-wide assembly of dozens of bishops. Aunarius presided over a diocesan synod attended by thirty-four priests, three deacons, and seven abbots. Vinobaudus, abbot of Saint-Germain at Auxerre, subscribed immediately after the bishop. The surviving acts have no lengthy introduction explaining why the council assembled. Instead, they move directly into forty-five concise regulations.
Their brevity makes them challenging, but it also gives them a remarkable directness.
Aunarius and the Christianization of Auxerre
Aunarius belonged to a generation of bishops who were not simply maintaining Christianity in Gaul. They were attempting to define what Christian life should actually look like.
The Roman political order in the West had disappeared, but much of Roman culture survived within the Frankish kingdoms. Cities remained episcopal centers. Rural churches continued expanding their influence. Monasteries grew into important institutions, while bishops increasingly tried to regulate the religious practices of populations scattered across towns, villages, estates, and countryside.
Aunarius participated in the larger church life of Merovingian Gaul and attended councils at Paris and Mâcon. Sources associated with his episcopate also reveal an interest in saints and local Christian memory. He encouraged the preservation of traditions concerning earlier bishops such as Amator and Germanus, while correspondence with Pope Pelagius II places him within the wider network of the western Church.
The Auxerre synod fits naturally into this wider program. Aunarius was not only telling people what they should reject. He was trying to move religious life toward churches, saints recognized by the Church, regulated liturgy, charitable giving, and clerical supervision.
That effort becomes especially clear in the opening canons.
The Kalends of January and the Animal Disguises
Canon 1 confronts customs surrounding the Kalends of January, the Roman New Year.
The surviving Latin forbids people from participating in customs associated with the cervulus and another animal or costumed figure whose precise interpretation has generated scholarly debate. It also prohibits the observance of what the canon calls strenae diabolicae, or diabolical New Year gifts.
Lucy Grig translates the central prohibition as forbidding people on the Kalends of January from dressing as a young calf or stag and from observing the custom of the diabolical strenae. What exactly every costume looked like is uncertain, but the broader setting is clear. Masking, animal impersonation, celebration, gift giving, and beliefs about good fortune continued to accompany the beginning of January.
These customs had a long history.
Roman New Year celebrations had included exchanges of gifts and wishes for prosperity. By late antiquity, Christian preachers repeatedly attacked practices surrounding the Kalends because they associated them with pagan religion, divination, excess, and the old Roman religious calendar.
Caesarius of Arles had preached forcefully against the January festivities earlier in the sixth century. In his sermon on the Kalends, Caesarius attacked New Year customs and interpreted continued observance as incompatible with Christian faith. Other late antique sermons describe people exchanging strenae, observing omens, arranging food in hopes of securing abundance for the coming year, and participating in masquerades.
Auxerre was therefore not confronting an entirely local custom. Canon 1 belonged to a much broader struggle over the Christian meaning of the calendar.
The Council of Tours had already acted against January customs in 567. One of its canons prescribed Christian observances as a response to the customs of the Kalends, while another attacked Christians who continued practices associated with the ancient festival. Auxerre continued this campaign a generation later.
The endurance of the Auxerre canon is particularly striking. Its language about the Kalends was repeated in later penitential literature, allowing a short rule issued in a Merovingian diocese to influence Christian discipline long after Aunarius’s lifetime.
Sacred Trees, Springs, and Vows
Canon 3 moves from the New Year into the religious landscape itself.
The canon prohibits certain vigils in private houses and condemns the fulfillment of vows among bushes, at sacred trees, and at springs. Someone who had made a vow was instead supposed to keep vigil in a church and fulfill that vow through an offering connected with the church or through assistance to the poor. The canon also forbids the making of wooden feet or human figures.
This is one of the most evocative passages in the entire council.
Trees, springs, wells, stones, and other natural places had carried religious meaning throughout the ancient world. The conversion of a population did not necessarily erase the importance of those locations. A spring associated with healing could remain important even when the people visiting it now identified themselves as Christians. An old sacred tree could continue attracting vows even if the person making the vow also attended Mass.
That helps explain the second half of the canon. Aunarius did not merely say that vows were forbidden. He redirected them.
The person who had made a vow was told to go to the church, keep vigil there, and direct the resulting gift toward the ecclesiastical community or the poor. The problem, therefore, was not simply the existence of a vow. It was where the vow was fulfilled and within what religious framework.
The prohibition against wooden feet and human figures may refer to votive objects, perhaps images connected with healing or petitions, although the exact meaning of the difficult Latin should be treated cautiously. What matters with greater certainty is that the council wanted religious acts removed from uncontrolled sacred places and placed within a Christian institutional setting.
This was reform through substitution as much as prohibition.
Diviners, Auguries, and the Sortes Sanctorum
Canon 4 takes the reader into another difficult boundary between Christianity and practices condemned as superstition.
Aunarius prohibited consultation of sortilegi, auguries, and figures described by the obscure term caragii. The canon also condemned the sortes sanctorum, the “lots of the saints,” together with lots made from wood or bread. Rather than consulting such methods, the canon directed people to conduct what they intended to do in the name of the Lord.
The sortes sanctorum are especially important because they demonstrate that practices condemned by church leaders were not always straightforward survivals of non-Christian religion.
Christian forms of divination had developed in which sacred names, biblical material, written oracles, lots, or other objects could be used in an attempt to discover hidden knowledge or predict the future. Some surviving oracular systems appear to have been Christianized versions of older divinatory methods. The religious language had changed, but the desire to obtain an answer about an uncertain future remained.
Auxerre was not the first council to confront the problem.
The Council of Vannes in the fifth century and the Council of Agde in 506 had already condemned practices called the sortes sanctorum. Agde complained of people who practiced divination under the appearance of religion and falsely called their method the “lots of the saints.” The repeated legislation suggests that Christian authorities had struggled with such practices for generations.
This distinction matters. A person consulting the sortes sanctorum might not have believed that he was rejecting Christianity. He may have believed that he was seeking divine guidance through Christian means.
For bishops like Aunarius, however, attaching the names of saints to divination did not make divination acceptable.
The Vigils of Saint Martin
Canon 5 is brief, but historically fascinating.
After condemning unauthorized vigils and sacred-place practices in Canon 3, the council specifically prohibited the nocturnal observances being kept in honor of Saint Martin. The surviving wording emphasizes that these vigils were to be completely forbidden.
Saint Martin of Tours was hardly a pagan figure. He was one of the great saints of post-Roman Gaul.
That fact makes the canon particularly useful for understanding the religious world of the period. The council was not simply drawing a line between Christians on one side and openly practicing pagans on the other. It was also policing behavior taking place around Christian saints.
A gathering could invoke Saint Martin while still including actions that bishops considered improper. Christian devotion, communal celebration, local custom, feasting, older ritual habits, and popular religion could overlap.
The Church’s concern was therefore not only conversion in the narrow sense of persuading people to call themselves Christian. It was the much longer process of deciding which practices would be accepted as Christian once most of the population already did.
Regulating Christian Worship and Daily Life
The famous anti-superstition canons make up only a small part of Auxerre’s legislation.
Other regulations concerned liturgical practice and decorum, burial, clerical discipline, marriage and sexual relationships, and the organization of the diocese. Canons 14 and 15 deal with burial practices, while a substantial group regulates sexual and marital relationships. Canon 7 required regular diocesan synods for clergy and abbots.
The council also tried to protect the distinction between the church as sacred space and the church as a setting for ordinary social behavior.
Later summaries of the canons preserve prohibitions against secular dancing, women’s songs, and feasting within churches. Other rules regulated the Eucharist, Sunday observance, the conduct of priests, and the proper celebration of worship.
Seen together, the forty-five canons reveal that Aunarius’s project was much larger than the suppression of paganism. He wanted a disciplined Christian society in which places, times, rituals, clergy, marriages, burials, and festivals operated according to standards set by the Church.
The sacred tree and the altar were therefore part of the same reform program.
Auxerre Was Part of a Larger Gallic Campaign
The Council of Auxerre becomes even more significant when placed beside other sixth-century sources.
Caesarius of Arles had attacked diviners, auguries, charms, sacred trees, springs, and the Kalends earlier in the century. The Council of Tours condemned January observances. Royal legislation attributed to Childebert I also acted against practices associated with improper vigils and celebrations. Agde had attacked sacred lots, and later councils would continue condemning auguries and similar customs.
Even after Auxerre, the problem did not disappear. The Council of Clichy in 627 or 628 complained that Christians continued observing auguries in a way comparable to pagan practice.
Repeated condemnations can be read in two ways.
They may show that older customs remained remarkably persistent. If bishops kept forbidding the same behavior, people were probably continuing to perform at least some of it.
At the same time, historians must remember that church legislation was often copied. A later bishop might repeat an earlier prohibition because it belonged to an established reform tradition, not because every practice named in the canon was equally common in every village of his diocese.
The canons are therefore evidence of episcopal anxiety and ecclesiastical policy first. They become evidence for everyday religious practice only when interpreted carefully.
Was Sixth-Century Auxerre Still Pagan?
It would be tempting to read Canons 1 through 5 and imagine a countryside filled with secret pagans worshipping trees, sacrificing at springs, wearing animal masks, and consulting sorcerers.
The historical reality was probably more complicated.
Modern historians of Merovingian religion have increasingly warned against assuming that every practice church writers labeled pagan was performed by people who understood themselves as pagans. Some customs could survive after their original theological meaning had faded. Others could be reinterpreted through Christianity. Still others may have represented local traditions that never fit neatly into either category.
A person might attend church, honor Saint Martin, invoke Christian saints, make vows, and still believe that a particular spring possessed healing power. Another might exchange New Year gifts because the custom had been observed for generations rather than because he consciously worshipped an ancient god.
The sortes sanctorum provide an especially clear example of this blurred religious boundary. Their very name attempted to place divination within a Christian sacred world.
Scholars such as Yitzhak Hen, Bernadette Filotas, Lisa Kaaren Bailey, and Lucy Grig have consequently encouraged more careful readings of texts about superstition and pagan survival. The question is not simply whether Christianity had defeated paganism. The more revealing question is how bishops attempted to define legitimate Christianity within a society where inherited custom, local ritual, saint devotion, magic, healing, festival culture, and official worship continued to overlap.
Auxerre captures that process unusually well.
From Local Synod to Medieval Canon Law
The Council of Auxerre did not disappear with Aunarius.
Its canons circulated in early medieval canonical collections, including the Collectio Sancti Amandi, the related Collectio Bellovacensis, and the Collectio Burgundiana. Centuries later, Burchard of Worms incorporated several Auxerre canons into his Decretum. Ivo of Chartres likewise preserved material from the council, and some of its legislation eventually entered works associated with Gratian’s great medieval canonical tradition.
Canon 1 had an especially important afterlife. Its prohibition of the January animal disguises reappeared in later penitential traditions, allowing an obscure diocesan regulation from Merovingian Auxerre to influence Christian teaching far beyond the region in which it originated.
The survival of the canons also explains why historians can know so much about concerns that might otherwise have disappeared without a trace.
The people who dressed themselves for the Kalends, visited springs, carved wooden figures, sought sacred lots, or gathered at unauthorized vigils left few writings of their own. Much of what survives about them comes from the clergy who wanted those customs stopped.
The Council of Auxerre is therefore both invaluable and frustrating. It allows the historian to see religious practices that official Christian narratives might otherwise conceal, but usually through the eyes of men who considered those practices errors.
What the Council of Auxerre Reveals
The Council of Auxerre belongs to a period when western Europe was undeniably Christian but still undergoing a profound transformation in what Christianity meant in everyday life.
Churches stood in the cities. Bishops exercised considerable authority. Saints such as Martin and Germanus commanded widespread devotion. Monasteries were powerful institutions, Christian festivals ordered the calendar, and generations had already lived under Christian rulers.
Yet Christianity at the local level was not simply a finished system imposed uniformly from above.
People carried habits with them.
They celebrated the beginning of the year. They sought good fortune. They made vows when illness or danger entered their homes. They visited meaningful places in the landscape. They wanted answers about the future. They gathered at night to honor saints. They blended inherited custom with the religious language available to them.
Aunarius’s answer was to draw boundaries.
The New Year should not be marked through condemned disguises and lucky gifts. Vows should move from trees and springs into churches. Gifts should go to the Church or the poor. Divination should give way to trust in God. Vigils should exist under acceptable Christian discipline. Sacred spaces, festivals, and rituals should be ordered according to the Church rather than local custom.
The forty-five canons of Auxerre therefore preserve more than a list of rules. They record an encounter between official reform and lived religion.
That is why the council remains valuable nearly fourteen centuries later. Its canons show Christianity not at the moment of its arrival in Gaul, but during the slower and perhaps more difficult process of reshaping a society that was already Christian while still carrying many older ways of understanding sacred time, sacred places, fortune, healing, and the unseen world.
Sources & Further Reading
de Clercq, Charles, ed. Concilia Galliae A. 511–695. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 148A. Turnhout: Brepols, 1963, 264–272. https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503014838-1
Gaudemet, Jean, and Brigitte Basdevant-Gaudemet, eds. Les canons des conciles mérovingiens (VIe–VIIe siècles). Vol. 2. Sources Chrétiennes 354. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1989, 486–505. https://books.google.com/books/about/Les_canons_des_conciles_m%C3%A9rovingiens_VI.html?id=zZbigpCK14cC
Maassen, Friedrich, ed. Concilia aevi Merovingici. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Legum Sectio III, Concilia 1. Hanover: Hahn, 1893, 178–184. https://www.dmgh.de/mgh_conc_1/index.htm
Migne, Jacques-Paul, ed. Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina. Vol. 72. Paris: Migne, 1849, cols. 759–770. https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Patrologia_Latina/72
Aunarius of Auxerre. “Epistola ad Stephanum Abbatem.” In Patrologia Latina 72, cols. 767C–768C. Paris: Migne. https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Patrologia_Latina/72
Sot, Michel, Guy Lobrichon, Monique Goullet, et al., eds. Les Gestes des évêques d’Auxerre. Vol. 1. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2002. https://www.lesbelleslettres.com/livre/9782251340531/les-gestes-des-eveques-d-auxerre-tome-i
Gregory of Tours. Historia Francorum. Book 9, chap. 39. https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Historia_Francorum
Caesarius of Arles. Sancti Caesarii Arelatensis Sermones. Edited by Germain Morin. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 103–104. Turnhout: Brepols, 1953. See especially Sermo 192. https://iiif.biblissima.fr/collections/manifest/1dae6614b66fbe5e555e43e4760d159855627595
Halfond, Gregory. “Autissiodorense / Auxerre: Diocesan Synod in Auxerre; ca. 561–605.” Lexikon der Konzilien. 2026. https://www.konziliengeschichte.org/site/de/publikationen/lexikon/database/705.html
Halfond, Gregory I. The Archaeology of Frankish Church Councils, AD 511–768. Leiden: Brill, 2009. https://brill.com/display/book/9789047444060/Bej.9789004179769.i-292_001.pdf
Hen, Yitzhak. Culture and Religion in Merovingian Gaul, A.D. 481–751. Leiden: Brill, 1995. https://cris.huji.ac.il/en/publications/culture-and-religion-in-merovingian-gaul-ad-481-751/
Filotas, Bernadette. Pagan Survivals, Superstitions, and Popular Cultures in Early Medieval Pastoral Literature. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005. https://pims.ca/publication/isbn-978-0-88844-151-5/
Grig, Lucy. Popular Culture and the End of Antiquity in Southern Gaul, c. 400–550. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/popular-culture-and-the-end-of-antiquity-in-southern-gaul-c-400550/kalends-of-january/F27B0E81D3A5601B3A2D1DC1F3EDFC48
Arbesmann, Rudolph. “The ‘Cervuli’ and ‘Anniculae’ in Caesarius of Arles.” Traditio 35 (1979): 89–119. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/traditio/article/abs/cervuli-and-anniculae-in-caesarius-of-arles/2B780C38CC8C4592C3A2ABEEEF6B6D92
Klingshirn, William E. Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/caesarius-of-arles/introduction/89D9C56B00F2AADDEA79B01105681B46
Bailey, Lisa Kaaren. The Religious Worlds of the Laity in Late Antique Gaul. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/religious-worlds-of-the-laity-in-late-antique-gaul-9781472519030/
Flint, Valerie I. J. The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvx5wb8j
MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300080773/christianity-and-paganism-in-the-fourth-to-eighth-centuries/
Szafranowski, Jerzy. “Diocesan Synod of Auxerre.” Presbyters in the Late Antique West. Institute of History, University of Warsaw. https://www.presbytersproject.ihuw.pl/index.php?SourceID=1578&id=6
Shahan, Thomas. “Councils of Auxerre.” In The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02145a.htm